Seville city council has withdrawn the building permit for a planned mosque and Islamic cultural centre in the city’s Polígono Sur district, pending technical and legal reports on objections raised by the right-wing Vox party.
The item had been due before the executive committee of the municipal planning office on July 10. Instead it was pulled from the agenda after Vox submitted a written challenge to the project on Victoria Domínguez Cerrato street.
Planning councillor Juan de la Rosa said the reports were needed to weigh the observations Vox had lodged. He said the council would decide whether to take the matter into consideration only once those reports were on the table.
De la Rosa played down the delay, saying that withdrawing an item to study it in more detail was nothing new and had been done with other files.
The scheme, promoted by the private Fundación Mezquita de Sevilla and designed by architect Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra, includes a prayer hall, ablution rooms, a courtyard and a 30-metre minaret alongside social and cultural facilities.
Vox argues that the file describes a specific orientation as a requirement for the prayer hall, indicating that worship is the principal use of the building rather than an ancillary one. On that reading, the group says a different article of Seville’s 2006 general urban plan should apply, one that caps complementary uses at 40 per cent of floor space.
The party’s municipal spokesman, Gonzalo García de Polavieja, welcomed the withdrawal and called on the mayor to open a public consultation. He said Vox would not permit the islamisation of the city’s neighbourhoods.
He said residents of the district and neighbouring areas did not want a mosque, and that the area needed a metro line, health and education facilities, security and street cleaning first.
Mayor José Luis Sanz, of the People’s Party, said on July 9 that the private promoters had followed the normal permit procedure, having applied less than a year earlier. Ideologies did not stand above the law, he said.
The foundation has maintained that the permit must be granted in law, and that refusing it would amount to an administrative anomaly. Its vice-president, Jalid Nieto, told Europa Press that planning officials had reviewed the project and found no grounds for refusal.
Nieto said the foundation would appeal through administrative channels, and to the courts if necessary, should the permit be delayed further or refused.
The dispute has spread beyond city hall. Manuel Gavira, Vox’s most senior figure in Andalusia, raised the project in the regional parliament, while the government commissioner for the Polígono Sur has said he sees no objection to it.
